Bruce Langford's
Mindfulness Mode Podcast

297 Overcoming Domestic Violence With Mindfulness; Rosie Aiello

February 18, 2018 by Bruce Langford

Rosie Aiello engineered an international escape from domestic abuse after a 25 year marriage to save her daughter and herself from ongoing terror and cruelty. Nearly mentally destroyed, she reinvented herself since arriving back in the United States, started her own business, and became a speaker, best-selling author and an international awarding-winning entrepreneur. Rosie and her daughter are now sharing their powerful story of escape, healing, and freedom in their upcoming memoir called 11 Hours to Freedom. Rosie helps women regain their voice and confidence, and rebuild their life so that they can create a joyful and prosperous life that they deserve.

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Effect on Emotions

It helps me get centered and not fly off when I want to fly off, because trauma survivors have a tendency to go and fly off. We get into panic hypervigilance and things like that.

So it's key, and one of the things that I have on my wall that I have to keep reminding myself of, is that being fearful and afraid is not the same thing as being in danger. You have to kind of live life by that.

Thoughts on Breathing

As I've learned about this, I introduce it to all my coaching. Breathing is an integral part of it.

I have to be reminded as well to breathe in slowly through my nose and go really slow on the exhalation to just slow everything down.

It's key. Absolutely key to calming the whole nervous center, calming the fight and the flight and the freeze that we can get into so easily. It's just critical.

Bullying Story

Well, if I can take my own relationship, that was bullying the whole time.

You usually use bullying sort of in the context of children, but when we grow out of children then it's abuse. It's all the same words for the same thing.

So, what was predominant, for me, was that he would just say, you're not a good wife, you're not a good partner, you're not a team player. He kept thinking for me and I just thought, ‘oh, I'm not?'

And so what happened is I kept doubting myself and thinking, ‘I'm not good enough. I'm never good. I'm never right, I'm never good enough. I'm just a failure.'

It snowballs into these attacking words and the humiliation of the way I was treated. So for me, personally, I regressed, I just turned in. Other people can get aggressive. That's a human style.

But what happens is, you have these two avenues. Mine was to recoil, because I made the connection that if I spoke up, and try to say what was on my mind, he would get angrier.

The bully gets angry. That's how they dominate, that's a method of domination, and it worked on me.

So I saw that instead of putting more fuel to the fire, I just kept quiet. That was my survival method, but it was unconscious. It wasn't a conscious survival method.

So had I known everything that I know now, I'd have gotten out sooner and figured it out, and I would've been able to say, ‘Rosie, this is not about you, this is about him.'

I couldn't say that. So I took all that in. But I could've had those keys to say, ‘Rosie, he's angry, he's projecting, and you are a good person. You are smart. You are good enough,' but I couldn't do that. I didn't have it.

So that would be so key. And if these children can hear that, that they are smart. They're good enough. They're brilliant, they've got a good heart. We just have to put them in the right direction. But if they're ground down at a young age, it's such a long journey to get them out of it.